Taken from

WHISTLESTOP:
My Favorite Stories from Presidential Campaign History
By John Dickerson

Introduction

Across from the mayor’s office in Manchester, New Hampshire, is a little exhibit celebrating the first‑in‑
the-nation primary. I interviewed Senator Rand Paul there as I covered his unofficial kickoff to his 2016
presidential campaign.
In the Primary Room is a replica of a newspaper about another Senate candidate, Edmund
Muskie of Maine. The headline of the 1972 New Hampshire Sunday News reads, “Muskie Calls Loeb a
Liar.” The deck adds “Senator Rants Emotionally at Publisher.” It was a turning point for Muskie. In a
speech on a flatbed truck in the snow, he attacked the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader and
appeared to cry. Supporters said they weren’t tears, but melted snow. Popular lore held that the fallout
from the crying doomed Muskie’s candidacy.
It’s a familiar tale to campaign junkies. It’s one of the stories reporters might rehash after a long
day following candidates. One person recounts a little piece of the story, is topped by the next one, and
a third reporter embellishes. Since I wasn’t at the bar yet, I posted a picture of the newspaper on
Instagram, with the caption “It made me weep.” Jonathan Martin of the New York Times posted not long
after, “It was the snow!!!!” Peter Hamby of CNN quoted from Muskie: “This man Loeb doesn’t walk, he
crawls.”
This book grew out of exchanges like that one. Over the last six presidential cycles I’ve covered,
I’ve collected a lot of stories like this about previous campaigns. While you’re watching one race, there’s
usually an echo from the past that gives you a guide about what might happen. I’ve put some of them
down here, retaining the thematic structure of reporter conversations where we hopscotch across
time— talking about 1948 one moment and 1976 the next.
Watching Edmund Muskie’s New Hampshire crucible on film in order to write chapter six, it was
even more colorful than I had known, but reading the oral history of the campaign, it is a story about
something more than just a candidate crack‑up. It’s really a story about how expectations for a
campaign can sink a candidate. That tale of expectations is one story we saw again and again in
presidential campaigns, even the 2016 race. Chapter four, the story of Bill Clinton’s 1992 comeback in
the Granite State twenty years later, is about how expectations worked in an entirely different fashion.
When I first told some of these stories on the Slate podcast Whistlestop, I took my cues from
what was happening in the political conversation in 2015 and 2016. Donald Trump’s surprise success
was historic. So was Bernie Sanders’s unexpected string of victories. But there were also historical
antecedents. Reading old newspapers on my iPad while flying back from an interview with a 2016
candidate, the two stories felt very familiar. The broken links to the past tell us something too about
how we’ve changed our standards and about the values and thinking behind the way we look at
presidential campaigns today.
The 1840 presidential campaign circus that helped sell William Henry Harrison to the public
seemed a lot like the Trump circus seems today. The candidates couldn’t be more different— Harrison
was packaged as a humble farmer, and Trump was running on his wealth— but the daylong parade the
Whigs devoted to their candidate was as raucous and issue-free and pitched to the appetites of the
masses as a Trump rally kicked off by the candidate buzzing a stadium in his 757 or the helicopter rides
he was giving at the Iowa State Fair. At the same time, John Quincy Adams, who fretted about
candidates who made base appeals to the people, would look at the rise of the reality-show candidate
and say, “This is what we worried about.” Andrew Jackson is losing his place on the twenty dollar bill,
but his argument for the wisdom of the people over the elites sounds a lot like what Bernie Sanders and
Donald Trump are saying today. To understand Bernie Sanders requires understanding the frustration
people have about an economy they think is rigged, but it can also be explained in the historical liberal
yearning for a process where the people have a chance to overthrow the powerful and the privileged.
That story starts in chapter thirteen in 1824 and moves through Truman in 1948, McGovern in 1972, and
Dean in 2004.
These are stories about personalities— Jefferson, Truman, Kennedy, Reagan— but campaigns
are also a reflection of the country that elevates or destroys those personalities. Real dreams are at
stake. When the McGovern campaign crumpled over his choice of Thomas Eagleton as his running mate,
it may very well have doomed the liberal experiment for a generation, as historian Bruce Miroff
suggests. If Edward Kennedy and Howard Dean had managed their campaigns better, perhaps their
ideas would have prevailed. Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan had a dramatic fight during the 1976
campaign that might have looked like just a battle over delegates in a chess match for power, but at the
heart of that campaign was an ideological battle about what was possible in government and what it
meant to be a conservative. The capitulation Ronald Reagan saw in Gerald Ford is the same one
Republican candidates identified in their GOP leaders in 2016.
The elements of passion, authenticity, and ideas wind through all of these moments. On the
Republican side, the echoes of 1952 and 1976 are everywhere as the GOP wrestles for its identity in
2016 and as the establishment and grassroots tussle for supremacy. The #Never- Trump movement
shares so many parallels with the 1964 Stop Goldwater movement that it even includes Governor Mitt
Romney playing a very similar role to the one his father, Governor George Romney, played a generation
before. In George Wallace’s 1968 campaign we hear such close echoes of Donald Trump that it’s as if the
transcripts have been transposed.
When I first started as a secretary at Time Inc. in New York, I lived in the Strand bookstore on
weekends, where a little nook contained lots of the books that I’ve relied on here. The prices written in
pencil in the corners under the covers were just right for my budget. I had read them over the years as I
covered campaigns. Going through them as I wrote Whistlestop, I found plane tickets from the Dole
campaign in 1996, old business cards, napkins, and hasty marginalia that seemed vital at the time,
judging from the check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points. I’d carried some of them to my first
two conventions in 1992. In the days before cell phones, one of my jobs was to care for the phones
reporters used on the convention floor. I’d set them out at the start of the day and collect them for
safekeeping overnight.
I came across old friends like John Stacks, the author of Watershed, a book about the 1980
campaign. He promoted me to be a reporter at Time, and my copy of his book has a fringe of Post‑it
notes all curled and brittle from age.
I also spent a little time with my mother. She was a political reporter who covered some of
these races. She’d had a stroke and was hospitalized during the first campaign I covered, so we never
got to talk about this life much, but when she died I became the keeper of her books. There she was in
the margins of Theodore White’s books on the presidency. Senator Hugh Scott, who helped draft
Eisenhower in 1952 and was run over by Goldwater in 1964, signed his book to her with “To Nancy
Dickerson: Peripatetic, percipient— and pretty too!” (You could get away with that kind of fanny pat
back then.) When William White signed his book about Senator Robert Taft to her, she was six years
from being married to my father.
Elections are a way voters search for a sense of control over their lives. They are also a national
conversation about what we believe, our national purpose, and how to keep ourselves on track. Because
the American experience is so grounded in its founders and the system they created, history gives us the
outline for our present narrative. We look back at it when we’re writing about the present to remind
ourselves of where we fall short, but also of the promise and glory in the four-year competition to make
things better.
I hope you enjoy these moments of campaign history. They are just a few stops along the way.
There are many great Whistlestops to come, from the past and in the future.

From the book WHISTLESTOP: My Favorite Stories from Presidential Campaign History. Copyright (c)
2016 by John Dickerson. Reprinted by permission of Twelve/Hachette Book Group, New York, NY. All
rights reserved.